About those catalysts...

I'm starting to get irked by their availability (or lack thereof.) My Blaster already has a fully catalyzed ATO set, and he's sitting on 2 or 3 extra Catalysts that he couldn't do anything with even if he wanted to. Does anyone know if there's been any mention of making them account bound instead of character bound?

I would love to swap some amongst my characters, and it'd also be nice to see them as a reward table for completing DA arcs and I-Trials (and purchasable with Villain/Emp merits) with a fair cooldown. Just wondering if this has been addressed on U Stream or anything, I never get to keep up with this kind of stuff anymore.

There's been a few threads here and there with players suggesting a method for using extra Catalysts or having another way to obtain them. No offical dev word yet, as far as I've seen.

In a Ustream chat, the Devs said they were looking into it. So, they have to decide how to make them Account Bound (there are several ways, but each requires some coding to make happen); schedule programmer time to make that happen (which means something else is delayed a bit to make this happen); test it; then implement it.

So, it may not be until the next Issue that it happens.

Supposedly there's (currently) no way for the devs to account-bind salvage; it can only be marked as "untradable." Which means somebody dropped the ball in making the things salvage in the first place instead of some other kind of drop.

There's a fair amount of circumstantial evidence to suggest that someday we'll get more ATO sets, but so far, nothing concrete. And by the time those come out, how many Catalysts will you have? "Great, now I can use twelve catalysts! Assuming I can find room in my build for twelve different ATOs. And what am I supposed to do with these other fifty catalysts I've been accumulating for the past eight months?"

Personally, I'm hoping they can figure out a way to add some functionality to the things so all those extras are good for something -- let us use them on IOs as enhancement boosters, maybe? Or convert them to something else like we do with unwanted Incarnate salvage? Or spend them like merits? Or use them as converters? Or... I don't know. Something.

One of the ideas the devs tossed around which seem spretty feasible is just making it so you can trade them in for one as an account item on a one for one basis.

That is, you'd go to say Astral Christie and give her a catalyst and poof, you'd have 1 sitting in your 'account items' e-mail box.

There is a workaround, if you don't mind burning enhancement unslotters and converters - follow these steps for your Blaster with the full set of Superior ATO's:

1. Grab a spare Blaster ATO

2. Unslot your superior ATO and replace with the spare

3. use excess catalyst on newly slotted ATO

4. use converter(s) on unslotted superior ATO until you have something the other character can use

5. Email to the other character

6. repeat until all excess catalysts used

They can't be traded - but unlike the catalysts themselves, Superior ATO's are account bound, so you can email to yourself